From the end of 1841 I was on my death-bed, as regards my membership of the Anglican Church, though at the time I became aware of it only by degrees.  A death-bed has scarcely a history; it is a tedious decline, with seasons of rallying and seasons of falling back.  My position at first was this:  I had given up my place in the movement in the spring of 1841, but I could not give up my duties towards the many and various minds who had been brought into it by me; I expected gradually to fall back into lay communion; I never contemplated leaving the Church of England; I could not hold office in its service if I were not allowed to hold the Catholic sense of the Articles; I could not go to Rome while she suffered honours to be paid to the Blessed Virgin and the saints which I thought in my conscience to be incompatible with the supreme glory of the One, Infinite and Eternal; I desired a union with Rome under conditions, Church with Church; I called Littlemore my Torres Vedras, and thought that some day we might advance again within the Anglican Church; I kept back all persons who were disposed to go to Rome with all my might.

The “Via Media” was now an impossible idea; I abandoned that old ground, and took another.  I said, “Much as Roman Catholics may denounce us at present as schismatical, they could not resist us if the Anglican communion had but that one note of the Church upon it—­sanctity.”  I was pleased with my new view, but my friends were naturally offended at a novel line of argument which substituted a sort of methodistic self-contemplation for the plain and honest tokens of a divine mission in the Anglican Church.

In spite of my ingrained fears of Rome, in spite of my affection for Oxford and Oriel, yet I had a secret longing love of Rome, the Mother of English Christianity.  It was the consciousness of this bias in myself which made me preach so earnestly against the danger of being swayed in religious inquiry by our sympathy rather than by our reason.  I was in great perplexity, and hardly knew where I stood; I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness and underhand dealing from the majority.  But I have never had any suspicion of my own honesty.

In July, 1844, I wrote to a friend:  “I am far more certain, according to the fathers, that we are in a state of culpable separation than that developments do not exist under the Gospel, and that the Roman developments are not the true ones.”  I then saw that the principle of development was discernible from the first years of the Catholic teaching up to the present day.  I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind must embrace either the one or the other.  I saw that no valid reasons could be assigned for continuing in the Anglican Church, and that no Valid objections could be taken to joining the Roman.